Crossover (5 page)

'I think a table
appeared out of nowhere and landed on the stage,' she said.

'At about the same time
as the weirdo showed up in the green room?'

'Irrelevant. The point
is, it brought the cops here. They've just come in through the rear
loading dock.'

'Can you go out the
front?' Benjamin asked.

'If they're at the
back, they'll be at the front too. My guess is, they've got the
building surrounded.'

'You have nothing to do
with the table or the mystery man. They can't hold you. Right?'

'No,' Ash said.
'But–'

Tognetti burst out of
the green room, holding his violin in one hand and the fake case in
the other. The false bottom flapped open wildly.

Ash paled. 'Oh no.'

'Officer!' Tognetti
shouted.

One of the cops – a
hulking, square-jawed blond – turned to look at him.

Tognetti pointed the
case at the pale boy. 'Arrest him!'

The cop moved closer.
'What's going on here?' he demanded.

'He's a thief,'
Tognetti said. 'He planted this contraption as part of a plot to
steal my violin.'

Pretty smart for a
musician, Ash thought.

The boy stared
curiously at the fake case. 'I don't know anything about that,' he
said.

'What's happening?'
Benjamin asked.

'They're arresting the
guy from the green room,' Ash hissed. 'They think he was trying to
steal the violin.'

'Okay – problem solved.
Right?'

'I told Tognetti he was
my driver. If either of them see me, I'm done. I need a
distraction.'

'No problem. At the
front, or the back?'

Ash hesitated. 'The
front. Something which will make people panic.'

'Can do.'

The cop was looking at
the cutting torch, still clenched in the pale boy's hand. 'Can you
explain why you have this?'

'No,' the boy said.

'All right.' The cop
pulled out a pair of hand cuffs. 'I'm arresting you on suspicion
of–'

The boy ran up the
wall.

Ash blinked. One moment
he had been standing still, the next he was sprinting up the
concrete as though gravity didn't apply to him. Soon he was
clinging to invisible hand holds in the ceiling high above.

Someone screamed. The
cop drew his gun. Tognetti vanished back into the green room.

'Come down from there!'
the cop ordered.

The boy ignored him. He
moved across the ceiling like a monkey swinging from branch to
branch, leaving the cop struggling to keep up as he pushed through
the crowd below.

'I don't think I need
that distraction any more, Benjamin,' she said.

There was no reply.

'Benjamin?'

* * *

Benjamin was no kind of
athlete. He had a weak, skinny frame and hair that always seemed to
be in his eyes. He usually left the physical stuff to Ash. But he
could sprint for short bursts if he had to, and tonight, the
adrenaline pumping through his body made it easy. A chilling wind
blustered in his ears as he dashed through the car park and ducked
down behind the car closest to the conservatorium.

Puffing, he listened
for a moment. No approaching footsteps. When he peeped over the
bonnet, he saw that the police had set up a makeshift checkpoint in
front of the main door. They were taking driver's licenses, and
shining torches in faces to check that they matched the
photographs. The civilians babbled amongst themselves, as though
they'd seen something unbelievable.

Something like a table
appearing out of nowhere, Benjamin thought.

The car was a
four-wheel drive, grey, with plenty of room underneath. He sniffed
– no sign that the engine was leaking oil, or petrol, or anything
else flammable. Perfect.

No time to waste. Ash
was counting on him. Benjamin unzipped his backpack and took out a
plastic tube.

The sale of fireworks
was restricted. The buyer needed to have a special license except
at certain times of year, and even then, they needed to be at least
eighteen years old. But sparklers, the kind used in birthday cakes,
were available all year round from Benjamin's local supermarket. He
kept a stockpile for occasions such as this.

He cracked open the
tube and pulled out a bundle of about eight hundred sparklers,
fixed together with duct tape. It took him a few tries to grab one
near the centre of the bunch – his fingers were clumsy in the cold.
Once he had a firm grip on it, he pulled it out about half way. It
would be his fuse.

The cheap plastic
cigarette lighter clicked uselessly in his hand. It wouldn't
ignite.

'Come on,' he muttered.
'Come on!'

On the fifth try, the
flame exploded into life. He held the extended sparkler above it
until the magnesium caught, spraying light into the air and
stinging his hand.

He rolled the bundle of
sparklers under the four-wheel drive. It stopped under the drive
shaft, crackling. Anyone who looked over at the car would see it.
And when the rest of the bundle caught, Benjamin was pretty sure
they would all be looking.

Nothing more he could
do. He zipped up his bag and sprinted away into the darkness.

* * *

'Ash.' Benjamin sounded
puffed. 'Your distraction will be live in about about forty-five
seconds.'

Ash had the phone to
his ear, but Benjamin's voice didn't register. She was staring up
in amazement, along with everyone else, as the pale boy clambered
across the ceiling toward the rear loading dock. When he was almost
there, he let go, and fell what looked like it should have been a
lethal distance before landing in a crouch on the cement floor.

He didn't give the cop
time to catch up with him. Immediately he was running again, faster
than Ash had ever seen anyone move, weaving through the crowd
toward the back door.

'Ash! Are you
there?'

Ash blinked. 'Uh, yeah.
What did you say?'

'I said you've got
forty-five seconds before your distraction. But now it's more like
thirty.'

Ash whirled around and
started running toward the front door. A few people stared at her
as she pushed past – 'Hey, I loved your piece,' someone said – but
most were looking toward the other end of the corridor, where the
boy had disappeared.

When she emerged
through the front doors, she found herself trapped in a police
cordon with several other audience members. Cops were checking IDs
all around her. Ash had none. She had bluffed her way in. She
didn't like her chances of bluffing her way out.

'Excuse me, Miss,' a
burly police officer said. 'I'll need to see your driver's
license.'

'Hey!' An elderly man
rapped his walking stick on the ground behind Ash. 'I was here
first!'

Ash stepped aside. 'Oh,
I'm so sorry,' she said. 'After you.'

The old man looked
disappointed, as though he had been looking forward to an argument.
He held his senior's card out with a trembling hand–

And in the nearby
parking lot, a car exploded.

Ash ducked as a flash
lit up the air and a blast of heat washed over her. The cops all
whirled around to face the grey four-wheel drive, which had
disappeared in a sudden glaring haze.

Ash didn't stop to
wonder how Benjamin had managed to blow up a car on such short
notice. Instead, she slipped behind the back of the burly policeman
while he was distracted, and sprinted across the courtyard to the
cover of the nearby trees.

Her bicycle was chained
to a sign post. As she fiddled with the combination lock, she
glanced back the way she came. The flames had died away, and
somehow the car was unharmed. Benjamin must have rigged up some
kind of flash grenade beneath it.

But she didn't have
time to wonder how. A police officer, female, athletic, was
sprinting toward her. Another cop wasn't far behind.

Ash ripped the
combination lock open, jumped onto the bike and started pedaling
across the stony dirt. She could hear the policewoman's frenzied
breaths. Her thudding footsteps grew louder as she caught up.

'Hold it right there!'
the cop roared.

Ash didn't. She pumped
her legs as fast as she could. The spokes rattled underneath her.
The slight uphill slope made it hard to accelerate.

She was riding parallel
to a storm water drain. It was currently dry – if she twisted the
handle bars and rode into it, she would probably have a clear path
all the way to the lake. No more dodging trees and parked cars.

But first she would
have to survive the landing. And the drain was deep, with steep
concrete walls.

She could hear the cop
catching up to her. I don't have a choice, she thought.

She took a deep breath,
and–

Something slammed
sideways into her. She gasped and shielded her face as she was
thrown off her bicycle – but somehow she didn't hit the ground.

It took her a moment to
realise that she'd been hit by a person and not a train. Someone
had crash-tackled her, caught her and was now carrying her in
unbelievably strong arms toward the storm water drain.

She didn't have time to
look at his face before he jumped.

Ash screamed as she
found herself suddenly in flight, sailing all the way over the
drain. Her stomach churned in her belly and her heart thudded in
her ears.

Her rescuer crashed
into the dirt on the other side and, before she had time to find
her balance, dropped her.

She thumped onto the
ground and looked dizzily up at him.

'You?' she said.

'Can you run?' the pale
boy asked.

Ash scrambled to her
feet. On the other side of the drain, the cop was shouting rapid
instructions into her radio. Sirens wailed on the breeze.

'I think so,' Ash
said.

'Then run,' the boy
said, and he sprinted into the trees at an incredible pace.

Ash hesitated for a
moment. He was crazy, or a liar, or at least dangerous. But he had
saved her, and she wanted to know why.

She ran after him.

'So who are you?' Ash
demanded.

The boy said
nothing.

They were a few
kilometres away from the conservatorium. Ash had no idea where the
boy was going, but wherever it was, he was taking a roundabout
route to get there.

She guessed he was
trying to mislead anyone who might be following them. But Ash was a
professional thief, and her finely honed intuition told her they'd
gotten away cleanly. The only cars which passed them were traveling
the opposite way. The towering oaks which lined the street were
silent. The streetlamps left few shadows for anyone to hide in.

'You won't even tell me
your name?' Ash said.

'Anything I say to you
could change the course of history,' the boy said. 'It's safest if
we don't talk.'

Ash wasn't sure if she
believed him, but she had to act as though she did. 'You dropped a
table into the middle of a concert. You caused a panic and started
a manhunt. You've already changed the course of history.'

'I can't do anything
about that. But information about the future could wreak havoc on
the past.'

'Anything you say to me
stays a secret,' Ash said. 'I can't even tell anyone that I was at
the conservatorium. I was there illegally.'

The boy glanced over
sharply. 'Why?'

'Why should I tell you?
You're not giving me much in return.'

'I saved you from the
police.'

'If it weren't for you,
I wouldn't have needed saving.'

They walked in silence
for a moment.

'My name is Six,' the
boy said.

'Uh-huh. People in the
future have numbers instead of names?'

'No. Just me. All Deck
agents use numbers to hide their true identities, but I have no
real name to conceal.'

'Right. Your parents
never got around to naming you?'

'I was grown in a jar,'
Six said. 'I have no parents.'

Ash rubbed her temples.
She was getting nowhere. 'You said something about radioactive
materials.'

'I'm looking for a
stockpile of ununoctium.'

'That's
clearly
a made-up word.'

'It's not. It's a
superheavy element which doesn't occur in nature. A small group of
scientists has managed to stabilise it.'

'Why do you need
it?'

'I don't need it.'

Ash clenched her teeth.
'Listen,' she began. 'I can't help you, if–'

'Sorry.' Six turned to
face her. She noticed that his pupils were unnaturally large, as
though he had taken some kind of drug. 'The time machine runs on
ununoctium. A woman named Soren Byre is going to use it to
assassinate some people in the past. But if I can find and destroy
the last stockpile of it, she'll never be able to build the
machine. Problem solved.'

He started walking
again. Ash ran to catch up.

'Hang on,' she said.
'If she never builds the machine, how will you get back here to
destroy the unobtanium?'

'Ununoctium,' Six
corrected. 'And I don't know. I'm not a physicist. But I'm stuck in
the past, and I can't think of a better plan.'

'It's not the past,'
Ash said. 'It's the present.'

'That's semantics.'

'No it isn't. The past
has already happened. It's immutable. But since you're here–'

'Don't look around,'
Six said, 'but someone's following us.'

'What?' Ash fought the
instinct to look back. 'How do you know?'

'I can hear footsteps.
She's about three blocks behind.'

It seemed impossible
for him to hear footfalls at that distance, but Ash didn't object.
'She?'

'If it's a man, he
doesn't weigh very much. Turn here.'

Ash turned in to an
alley between two tall buildings, her heart pounding. Six pressed
his back against the wall.